A Friend of the Family by Lauren Grodstein

Pete Dizinoff, a skilled and successful New Jersey internist, has a loving and devoted wife, a network of close friends, an impressive house, and, most of all, a son, Alec, now nineteen, on whom he has pinned all his hopes. But Pete hadn’t expected his best friend’s troubled daughter to set her sights on his boy. When Alec falls under her spell, Pete sets out to derail the romance, never foreseeing the devastating consequences.

In a riveting story of suburban tragedy, Lauren Grodstein charts a father’s fall from grace as he struggles to save his family, his reputation, and himself.

LAUREN GRODSTEIN is the author of the bestselling A Friend of the Family, which was a Washington Post Best Book of the Year, a New York Times Editor’s Pick, and an Indie Next selection; the collection The Best of Animals; and the novel Reproduction Is the Flaw of Love. She teaches creative writing at Rutgers University.

Unrated Critic Reviews for A Friend of the Family

The New York Times

Lauren Grodstein’s second novel, “A Friend of the Family,” is set primarily in the very recent past, but it reads like an exercise in nostalgia for the heady days before the global economic collapse, when a solidly middle-class internist like Pete Dizinoff, Grodstein’s wisecracking narrator, didn...

Book Reporter

By all accounts, Doctor Peter Dizinoff is living the American
dream: he has risen from humble beginnings in Yonkers, New York,
where his dad sold insurance and shared with Pete and his younger
brother a dream of a bigger home and a better life.

The Bookbag

USA Today

So why is he living above his garage, estranged from his patient wife, Elaine, and rebellious son, Alec?It will take most of Lauren Grodstein's sometimes maddeningly meandering novel to find out, but this mental journey with the infuriating yet compelling Dr. Pete is well worth the time.When Alec...

20Something Reads

But the book I remember enjoying the most was EIGHT MEN OUT by Eliot Asinof, which I got for the first night of my tenth Hannukah, and which took me longer to read than any book I’d previously encountered.

Bookmarks Magazine

A creative writing teacher at Rutgers University, Lauren Grodstein is the author of two previous books: The Best of Animals (2004), a collection of short stories, and Reproduction Is the Flaw of Love (2005), a short novel.

Oprah.com

He's galled by a son who against all odds has refused to succeed—a son who failed out of a college that doesn't even give grades—a son he believes he has endlessly coddled, and on whom he has pinned his inchoate hopes.